this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 230 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Some irony there. Tik Tok wants to be more like Youtube with its long form content. Youtube wants to be more like Tik Tok with its shorts content.

Neither seems to be winning the opposing battle.

[–] [email protected] 109 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Fucking YouTube shorts.

Every content creator has to partake in the stupidity because it's that or becoming an algorithm outcast, so they awkwardly cut bits of their videos just to post a couple of those.

And then YouTube forces them in everyone's throat, with absolutely no regard for the medium and no option to filter them out.

No, YouTube, I won't watch your stupidly formatted 10-second bits of nothing on my TV.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I'm so done with shorts I've added the whole shorts element to my adblocker.. you can't select the seeker bar in shorts, you can't autoscroll lol literally a retarded copy of tiktok with zero user experience functionalities

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

You can select it on mobile but it's super god damn glitchy and infuriating. I wouldn't mind shorts when they're helpful and jump straight to the point of how to fix/do something I'm looking up if it weren't for the garbage seeker bar.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (5 children)

We need a TikTube apparently.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago

I had to buy one of those for my dog

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago (1 children)

YouTok has entered the chat.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You do what, now? Is tok'ing what the kids are calling it these days?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (4 children)

does....does the tiktube go inside you?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If the companies had their way, it would go directly in to your brain

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just the ads, and you can't turn them off. Ever.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I think I saw that episode of Black Mirror

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

Just the tik.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Well youtube has both.

And I hope the long form videos take some sort video cues and don't have 3 minute long rambling intros anymore. The one nice things about shorts is they get to the point.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Short-form videos are basically a form of cancer that keeps you alive with shots of dopamine every 15-30 seconds. I avoid those things like the plague.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Those long rambling intros have started to happen on TikTok more and more

[–] [email protected] 206 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Unfortunately, if twitter has shown us anything, it's social networks are ridiculously hard to destroy, even when actively self-sabotaging

[–] [email protected] 104 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Instagram is absolute garbage compared to how it used to be. It's still massive. Once people are hooked, it's hard to wean them off. People were livid at reddit, but only a fraction of those who spoke up are here

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The average user doesn't even know anything happened.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

API? That's like being gay or trans right?

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 9 months ago (3 children)

They're hard to destroy until something (people view as) better shows up. My buddy Tom from MySpace got out while the getting was good.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Digg on the other hand did not see it coming.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Dude cashed out right at the peak, then took his money and travels the world with it. Tom never has to work another day in his life.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well time to make a good open source alternative.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 81 points 9 months ago

Oh no!

Anyways

[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's so funny one wanting to become the other, yt went to shit after shorts and tiktok is doing the same.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Why can't they put shorts somewhere else? I do watch them but I don't always want them, they clog up results and recommendations so bad

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

I hate that on the YouTube mobile app the shorts take up the entirety of your screen when you first open it. Like they really want you to watch shorts over their regular video content. And YouTube shorts still to this day don’t even work. If you open YouTube and watch 50 shorts a day, once a day for a week, after the first day you’ll see like one new short a day. There’s no algorithm, it just shows you the same exact shorts in almost the same exact order over and over again.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

the same but opposite. YT pushes shorts to compete with Tiktok. Tiktok pushes longform content to compete with YT

[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sounds a bit more like the format is getting very exhausting to people, and more people are recognizing the unhealthy effects.

So now they need to go the opposite direction to try and fix it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Nah, it's just enshittification. Every other video is an ad now and some videos that aren't labeled as ads are just viral marketing ads in disguise. The "for you" page gets exhausting with all these ads, and it's really the only way to discover new content.

Then there is tiktok live that they heavily push. Tiktok live can be sorta cool, but once the NPCing trend hit, 6 out of 10 live feeds are people unabashedly whoring themselves out for money, another 2 out of the ten are weird live "games" that are just p2p with the in currency gift system, another 10% are live open shops like Pokémon cards or freshwater clams for pearls or shit (which is kinda cool, but there are so many of them) then the last 1 are legitimately interesting live feeds.

Then it got even worse... they added competitions, which would require a certain amount of high value gifts to be sent by their viewers to obtain cash prizes for hitting certain gifting metrics. This turned almost all of the live feeds into just endless begging.

Then somehow it got worse... they added "battles" which pit two live feeds against each other. Nowadays it's a lot of Israel v Palestine or Trump V Biden streams. There timed and whoever collects more gifts wins the match. It's really nauseating to be honest...

It's not people slowly realizing that tiktok is bad, it's just tiktok actively becoming worse. The most frustrating thing is all your favorite videos are lurking somewhere on the site, but you have little control over what comes next and it often takes wading through mountains of shit to find something good.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Don’t be fooled. TikTok is going strong and will continue to go strong. How long has Twitter or Facebook been “on the decline?” Sure, maybe they’ve both lost a lot of users, but these kind of cultural touchstone apps don’t ever seem to go away. TikTok will be around for a long time to come.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The enshittification continues, until ~~morale~~ profit improves.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That implies that the enshittification will stop when profits increase, but we all know that it will never stop.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Stop, I can only get so erect!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

We found a way to squeeze 0.00023% more profit per user.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I don’t really agree with this post, at least in title (and not in the way many commenters seem to be “agreeing with it” despite maybe not reading the article).

Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”. It’s the same as Facebook or even other tech based services like Uber. They start off good and very user friendly to draw people in, often operating at a loss for years… and then they clutter themselves with ads and other monetizing features.

I don’t know Tiktoks profit loss margins but I’m guessing that it’s financially near or at its absolute peak performance so far, just as Facebook has continued to raise profits year after year despite often being detested more and more as time goes on.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I will say it was incredibly fast how quickly it transitioned to a giant money making machine compared to older platforms. It's much more rapidly viewable, and seems to have more conversation around that then it being legitimately a worse social platform.

The COVID boom to tech is the most probable answer as it was steroids to isolation accessable social interaction. But man they aren't even trying to ride the wave anymore but capture as much of the leftover ripples as possible.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

Is that a bad thing?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The company is pushing its eCommerce so hard you hear about it more than any other topic on the app, both in ads and organic videos from creators hoping for a share of the profits.

In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format.

Outrage is brewing among a growing contingent of users who post videos arguing TikTok is ruined now, and analysts say the company is jeopardizing its success.

But TikTok spearheaded the short-video revolution, and it risks straying from its core use case of fun, entertaining clips and losing its edge.”

The problem was bad enough that The Atlantic ran a story with the headline declaring “Instagram Is Over.” As time wore on it seems Meta has stuck the landing, but only through abandoning or at least retooling the projects that were alienating users.

Instagram honed its Reels product, ditched its shop, and embarked on a PR campaign promising that the app was hearing and responding to complaints.


The original article contains 975 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

"horizontal content"

I mean... C'mon. WHAT RATIO?!

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